The Left's contempt for the South is telling. Progressives claim that the region doesn't reflect real American values — yet no part of the country sends more men and women into the armed services.

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Will the last Democrat out of the South please turn out the lights?

With Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu going down to defeat by a crushing margin in last weekend’s runoff election, the party is now at a modern-day nadir in the region.

Landrieu’s loss made her the third incumbent Democrat from the South to lose reelection to the Senate this year, joining the ranks of Arkansas’ Mark Pryor and North Carolina’s Kay Hagan. At the same time, Republican Shelley Moore Capito picked up an open seat in West Virginia and Democrats failed to defeat vulnerable incumbents in Georgia and Kentucky.

It was a region-wide smackdown for President Obama’s party.

Even in Virginia, the one southern state in which Democrats’ fortunes have improved in recent years (thanks to an influx of blue-state types into the Washington, D.C., suburbs in the state’s north), Republican challenger Ed Gillespie came within a whisker of knocking off freshman Democrat Mark Warner, a popular centrist who once served as the state’s governor.

Democrats ought to be giving thanks for that demographic shift in the Old Dominion. Without Virginia, the party would only have two senate seats in all of the South when the new congress meets in January: Bill Nelson’s in Florida and the West Virginia seat occupied by Joe Manchin, the upper chamber’s most conservative Democrat and a constant threat to change parties.

This phenomenon is apparent at all levels of government. With the GOP having won the Arkansas governor’s race this year — and having successfully defended vulnerable executive mansions in Florida and Georgia — there are now only three Democratic governors in all of the South (and that number may well drop to two when Kentucky’s Steve Beshear is termed out of office next year).

Every southern state’s delegation to the U.S. House is majority Republican. And, with the single exception of the Kentucky House of Representatives, every state legislative chamber throughout the region is controlled by the GOP.

Sensible Democrats might be alarmed by such a sweeping rejection. After all, prior to Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the party hadn’t elected a non-southern president in nearly 50 years (John F. Kennedy in 1960). While the party is no longer as reliant on the South to build majorities as it once was, losing an entire chunk of the country is still a warning sign that something has gone badly amiss.

Rather than feeling sufficiently chastened, however, some liberals are scorning the region entirely.

Leading the charge is The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, who, in a column published earlier this week, argued that Democrats should abandon the South outright. Writing in the wake of Landrieu’s defeat, Tomasky — himself a West Virginia native — lashed out at Dixie as “a reactionary, prejudice-infested place.” And he was just getting warmed up. To wit:

“A toothless dog [Landrieu] is a figure of sympathy. A vet who takes pleasure in gassing it is not.

“And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment.”

That is not something you write in a column. That is something you scream into a pillow.

It’s easy enough to write Tomasky off as an unhinged crank, as any Democrat who hopes to keep the party off electoral life support will surely do. The problem for the Left, however, is that his views are far from the fringe.

In fact, Landrieu herself essentially described Louisiana voters as racist and sexist in the midst of her reelection campaign. Moreover, one can’t parse the musings of coastal liberal elites for long without running across dismissive references to the rubes in “Jesusland” or the mouth-breathers shopping at Walmart.

There’s a problem with making smug self-congratulation the basis of a political party: It tends to repel a lot more people than it attracts. While the urban sophisticates, media and academic elites and activist classes have always provided the left’s brainpower, they’re relied on an army of working-class voters and minorities to push them over the electoral finish line.

Now that times have gotten tough, the mask has dropped and, in their frustration, the former group is starting to reveal the contempt in which it regards the latter. That’s a surefire formula for winning the Westside of Los Angeles and Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it doesn’t play anywhere between the Colorado River and the Appalachian Mountains.

The Left’s contempt for the South is telling. Progressives claim that the region doesn’t reflect real American values — yet no part of the country sends more men and women into the armed services. They claim that it’s inherently backward-looking — yet it’s home to six of the nation’s top eight states for domestic migration. They claim that it’s intolerant — yet they’re the ones trafficking in uninformed stereotypes and slander. With outreach like that, is it much of a surprise that the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson can no longer compete in the region from which those iconic figures hailed?